Featured Artists’ Coalition means more music for fans

As credit markets tumble, while people and corporations scramble to find solid footing (you can see my interview discussing real estate), artists in the U.K. are taking steps to secure their fortunes as well. And the moves seem to be reasonable if not fair.

The newly formed Featured Artists’ Coalition is a venture of musicians and performers that are looking to keep control of their work. Some might presume that they would already control their music and have the full rights to it, but that has never been true in the U.K. and in America for most artists. Far too often the real controlling power has been the music companies, which doles out a pittance to performers and musicians while reaping hordes.

Unlike other such organizations in the past, this one has a huge and solid support of artists from every genre and time period. Already there have been over 60 artists involved as charter members. Some involved include:

Radiohead
The Verve
Kaiser Chiefs
Kate Nash
David Gilmour
Billy Bragg
Klaxons

This is a venture that is determined to achieve a level of fairness that has not existed in the industry ever before. One of the biggest motivations for artists today is the fact that the internet has changed the industry forever.

MP3 players and the ability to digitally download music on a single or album basis has changed the way the music industry makes music. This is even more expansive and environment changing than music videos and cable proved to be. And many artists have been excluded from the income that has been generated from these new formats.

So Featured Artists’ Coalition has sought changes, and I have no doubt that artists in America are watching closely on the result of these efforts. They want to be fairly compensated whenever the music companies make money off of their efforts, which seems reasonable. They want to keep the rights to their music, not being forced to automatically lose their rights to the music company. Again a fair request.

Perhaps the biggest thing they want is one that makes the most sense to me; they want music companies to either ‘use or lose’ the copyrights they have on an artists work. Effectively this means that all the work of an artist must be made available for purchase to the public in some format or the music company loses the rights to those songs. I for one would love to be able to get some of the less known or hard to find songs of several artists that music companies feel are not cost-effective enough to make available in a mass format.

If this Coalition takes flight and forces change in the U.K. then I expect sweeping reforms across the globe. This of course would be a win for the artists and performers, but they are not the ultimate winners. We the fans would gain the most from these changes. Ultimately it means that artists would have more reasons to perform, and more of their recordings would be available to the public either through the music company or the artist themselves.

So music fans should keep an eye to the U.K. and the music companies there. Change is coming and for the public it will be good.